Tag Archives: Prison Fellowship Ministries

The Worst Person in the Universe: Congressman Frank Wolf

Hat tip to Nolan Dalla for awarding Congressman Frank Wolf The Worst Person in the Universe award. Dalla writes:

Rep. Wolf is a longtime Republican congressman from Virginia.  He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives way back in 1980, riding the cozy coattails of Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory.  Since then, Rep. Wolf has been as faithful as a potted plant, deeply rooted to every corporate-funded, neoconservative, right-wing cause.  Like a slice of cold stale pizza, he’s one of the final leftovers of the late Jerry Falwell’s “Moral Majority,” a witch-hunting political movement of Bible-thumpers who once professed to know what’s good for us all, and was dedicated to transforming America into a modern theocracy named “Jesusville.”

In his so-called retirement, Wolf will continue to work with the worst theocratic elements in American society. His retirement statement says, emphasis and annotations mine:

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Prison Fellowship Ministries’ Klunder Problem

The AP reports “Prison counselors readied PR plan after kidnapping of 2 Iowa girls.

Days after two Iowa girls were kidnapped, a national group that provided faith-based counseling to their abductor before his release from prison was putting a public relations plan in motion and preparing to protect its image, records released Thursday show.

Michael James Klunder, was first accused of assault with intent to commit sexual abuse in 1986, when he was just fifteen years old. Five years later, he kidnapped and assaulted an twenty-one year old girl. He then kidnapped two three year old children and left them alive and abandoned in a trash bin fifty miles from where they were abducted.

Klunder graduated from the Iowa’s unconstitutional (and defunct) Innerchange Freedom Initiative faith-based counseling program. Unlike the media outlets Breakpoint and the Colson Center for “Christian” Worldview, IFI is the one program where Loudoun’s Prison Fellowship Ministries actually councils prisoners. The AP report continues.

Court records show that his Bible counselor heaped praise on Klunder when he was discharged, saying he was at the top of his class and “a very intelligent young man.”

“He is a changed individual with a good prospect of success,” the counselor wrote.

Klunder had cited his Christian-based treatment in litigation in which he was seeking parental rights for his son while behind bars, and in statements to the Iowa Bard of Parole pleading for his release.

Although he had a long history of violence, Klunder was released without supervision.

Prison Fellowship Ministries enjoys a $250K Loudoun tax exemption and is a local Republican darling. John Whitbeck, Chairman of the Republican 10th Congressional District Committee and leader of the Government Reform Commission outsourcing study suggested that Loudoun outsource social services to PFM. Congressman Frank Wolf was awarded the PFM Wilberforce award in 1990.

 

Gun control or thought control?

Pastor Doug Giles, Townhall columnist, and all-around "good guy"

 

“No one is willing to believe that adults too, like children, wander about this earth in a daze and, like children, do not know where they come from or where they are going…and are as thoroughly governed as they are by biscuits and cake and the rod.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “The Sorrows of Young Werther”

If Goethe were alive today, he might replace “biscuits and cake and the rod” with “guns and ammo and mental illness.” Wayne LaPierre, head of the NRA, wants taxpayers to fund a “national database of these lunatics,” because “good guys” need biscuits assault weapons and cake thirty-round clips. In addition to blaming the government for letting “these lunatics” out of the nuthouse, the innocent little LaPierre blames the video game makers (who market the guns and ammo he so adores) for gun carnage. The NRA isn’t likely to change their name to the “National Rifle and Friends of Mental Health Association” any time soon. Here’s what LaPierre said about mental health in a Meet the Press interview:

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An easy Reform Commission cut

Dear Loudoun County Government Reform Commission,

I have a way for you to immediately save Loudoun County taxpayers one quarter of a million dollars per year.

That is the amount of revenue the county is not receiving due to the property tax exemption granted in late 2003 to the massive Loudoun compound of Chuck Colson’s Prison Fellowship Ministries/Colson Center.

Our tax dollars at work.

Rescind it. PFM doesn’t qualify for a tax exemption. Tax exempt entities in Loudoun are not permitted to engage in partisan political advocacy and propaganda, and that is precisely what Chuck Colson uses his organization to do. Case in point – as discussed here, Chuck Colson has fabricated and repeatedly disseminated the following two big, honking falsehoods: that President Obama has redefined “freedom of religion” to be a more narrow concept of “freedom of worship,” and that the Affordable Care Act mandate to employers to provide contraceptive coverage as part of comprehensive health insurance plans is something new, and is “the most important issue — I really think the most important I’ve faced in my ministry, and the greatest threat to America, the greatest threat to us as Christians.” But in fact: Continue reading

disembodied fetus

[promoted by Liz]

In “Single-Issue Voter”, Roberto Rivera describes growing up in a Democratic Catholic blue-collar household.  He’s progressive on all the issues but, he’s “strongly pro-life” and finds himself politically aligned with people who “if, by some (please God!) miracle, abortion disappeared tomorrow, many of them would probably vote in much the same way they do now”.

Rivera wouldn’t.  He’d return to being a progressive, if “abortion disappeared”.

Roberto doesn’t know how abortion disappears.  Remarkably, his article makes no mention of “woman” or “pregnancy”. Abortion is something that “happens” to a disembodied fetus.

Disembodied 12-week fetus - National Library of Medicine

The illustration was produced with your tax dollars.  Isn’t he cute?  His name is Adam.  God created Adam from dust without the help of a woman.  The Adam above looks like he’s going to wake up and practice Mozart piano sonatas before he goes back to being a fetus.

That’s the image that Rivera wants you to maintain as he alludes to – if not women – to original sin.

A society that enshrines (the word fits particularly well in this context) the right to use private lethal violence against its weakest and most vulnerable members isn’t only unjust in this regard, it’s likely to be unjust pretty much across the board. The right to an abortion is based on a jurisprudence and an underlying worldview that denies the existence of a common good and holds personal autonomy and self-fulfillment as the highest goods.

Mark Earley wrote a similar piece, “No Life, No Justice” for Prison Fellowship Ministries that referenced Rivera’s article.  Earley does mention women, and Planned Parenthood, of course.

Since the passage of Roe vs. Wade in 1973, more than 48 million unborn children have perished—and only 7 percent of the women who had those abortions cited medical concerns, rape, or incest as their reasons. And those who promote abortions—they are flexing their muscle as never before. In Fiscal Year 2006-2007, Planned Parenthood…

According to Earley and Rivera, 93% of the time, women are choosing “personal autonomy and self-fulfillment” over their duty to dear Adam.

The fetus is fertile ground for conspiracy.  Rand Paul ratchet’s up the rhetoric in a very Delgaudioesque fundraising letter (emphasis mine).

 

Dear Concerned American,

It’s a horrifying modern day genocide happening in our own backyards.

Last year alone, Planned Parenthood was responsible for ending the lives of over 320,000 innocent babies….

I believe there is something deeply wrong with an organization that kills babies, and even more so when they are funded through the taxpayer dollars….

Planned Parenthood’s progaganda calls the pro-life movement a war on women.

And believe me, they have their supporters riled up like never before.

Daily emails from Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and Emily’s List are being sent smearing pro-life Americans like you and me as villains.

Maybe the fetus should should be sitting on a slippery slope.  Too bad there is no slope.  Roberto is no liberal.  If he was operating in the reality-based world he’d put down his moral smugness and ask, “what’s the root cause of abortion, unwanted pregnancy, maybe”?  Wouldn’t Rivera sound more rational if he said “if, by some (please God!) miracle, unwanted pregnancy disappeared tomorrow“?  But then he wouldn’t have a straw enemy.  He wouldn’t be able to blame women for using “private violence“.  He would have to take responsibility as a man.  He’d be forced to ask if that 7% (3.5 million) pregnancies terminated for reasons of medical concern, rape or incest “disappeared”, if that would require some degree of violence against societies weak and vulnerable.  He’d have to acknowledge that women actually embody those fetuses and that he’s advocating a Handmaid’s Tale world.

Suzanne Moore wrote personal piece in the Guardian, “It’s the same old game.  Get your rosaries off my ovaries, as we used to say“.  When she was 11, Moore and her mum were booted from a tupperware party.  When talk turned to ‘getting “rid” of things’, Moore’s mum blurted

Christ, you really don’t know what you are talking about. If it wasn’t for abortion I’d have a football team by now.”

Moore’s was writing about British “independent counseling” legislation.  It failed.  The British controversy is like the new clinic rules that are pushing Virginia to the forefront of the abortion debate reported in the Loudoun Times Mirror.  Both regulations intend to make it harder to obtain abortion services.  Moore’s analysis is relevant to Virginia.

We are repeatedly told this is an “emotive” issue. The new vocabulary of the anti-abortion lobby is full of vaguely feminist platitudes – not feminist enough to counsel the men who walk away from pregnancies but still. Underneath, we are fallen women, damaged goods and so terribly stupid that we can be persuaded to have a quick abortion by wicked charities. When we could be what? Wombs to provide babies for “proper couples” or go it alone as the root of all evil: single mothers?

This is nauseating. A vote of conscience? If MPs had one they would say it is not the business of the legislature to control women’s reproduction. They would stop telling us what is “emotive” and ask what actually is. I didn’t want counselling in order to have an abortion. I certainly did after a miscarriage – again an awfully common experience – but none was offered. No, instead let’s bring on an army of “independent” zealots who can tell us that abortion leads to cancer, mental health issues and infertility, and sod the evidence that having a baby is more risky than having an abortion. Anyone who talks about how easy it is and how the reality is glossed over is ignorant. You have a scan. You know and see what you are doing. It’s not a walk in the park but it is a huge relief. The emotive part is the enforced waiting.

Now the tactics are to further that wait. This is nothing short of cruelty dressed up in the language of concern.

Chris Freund of the Virginia Family Foundation explains the rationale for the regulations. “The threat that a health department inspector could visit the clinics at any time also will ensure that clinics operate safely”. When discussing medical procedures, it’s no longer polite to refer to “private lethal violence”.  “Safety” is a much better talking point.

Moore knows where Freund is coming from.

All fundamentalisms seek to control female sexuality. It’s the same old game. Get your rosaries off my ovaries, as we used to say. You trust me with a child but not with a choice? If MPs want to help women then they can make access to abortion and contraception more efficient. Who has the authority over my body – some geezer in the House of Commons? Or me and my doctor? Like my mother, I feel no shame and I refute this language of “care”. You want a definition of a nanny state? How about one that thinks it’s OK to poke around in your uterus?

 

Speaking of sexism

Ok, the title may be slightly misleading, because what we’re speaking of is really just an extreme form of self-centered blindness. Which is what sexism is a form of, I suppose.

This gem arrived from the outbox of Chuck Colson (search the name both here and at Equality Loudoun for the full Monty):

A group of mostly female students is suing Yale University for allowing a “sexually hostile environment” to exist on campus.

The women, of course, have a point. After all, when frat boys are allowed to parade around the old campus chanting “No Means Yes,” or to hold up signs that read “We Love Yale Sluts,” I guess you could say that’s a sexually hostile environment.

But may I ask a question? What did you expect?

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